Part 5

But on a visit to New York soon after, a Hollywood press agent who was close to Davidson bumped into a Madison Avenue advertising man whom he hadn’t seen for years. The old friend happened to tell the press agent about a funny thing he’d seen on the platform at the Democratic convention, which he’d attended on agency business: He’d watched Sinatra giving Rayburn the brush-off. Needless to say, the suit was dropped.

Politics are serious business to Frank--they used to be to me until I got tired of the game and decided to give the young ones a chance. I was doing a bit in a picture at Las Vegas while he was there making _Oceans 11_, and I wanted to talk to him. But he was always too busy. After the 1960 conventions came and went, he was off on the island of Maui doing _Devil at 4 O’Clock_ before he could keep a promise to come over to my house.

From Maui he sent me a letter “giving you all the answers to the questions you would have asked me if we actually did an interview.” He’s a John F. Kennedy man and I was a Robert Taft woman; what better subject for a letter than politics, Sinatra version?

“Every four years,” he wrote, “the same question arises: Should show-business personalities become involved in politics? Should they use their popularity with the public to try to influence votes?

“My answer has always been ‘yes.’ If the head of a big corporation can try to use his influence with his employees, if a union head can try to use his influence with his members, if a newspaper editor can try to use his influence with his readers, if a columnist can try to use his influence, then an actor has a perfect right to try to use his influence.

“My own feeling is that those actors who do not agree with my point of view are those who are afraid to stand up and be counted. They want everybody to love them and want everybody to agree with them on everything.

“I am not sure whether they are right or whether I am right. I only know what is right for me....”

I almost tore up the letter as soon as I’d read it because of its last paragraph: “Maybe it will make a good Sunday piece for you. If you think so, then please don’t start to edit it. These are my thoughts, and if you want to pass them on to your readers, let them stand as is.” I haven’t edited; I’ve quoted, but not all five pages. Life’s too short for that, and you probably wouldn’t read them, anyway.

Though he’s proud to be a Democrat, he’s uneasy about being called a “Clansman.” The Clan consists of the men with which this mixed-up, lonely talent has surrounded himself--Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., Joey Bishop, Peter Pentagon Lawford.

“I hate the name of Clan,” Frank once said.

“Did you ever look the word up in a dictionary?” I said. “It means a family group that sticks together, like the Kennedys you’re so fond of. They’re the most clannish family in America. I don’t like Rat Pack, but there’s nothing wrong with the name of Clan.”

What is wrong with the Clan and the Leader, as his gang have christened Frank, is the pull they both have over young actors who would give their back teeth to be IN. Membership dues include generally behaving like Mongols from the court of Genghis Khan.

The Clan was riding high the night Eddie Fisher opened his night-club act at the Ambassador Hotel here, before the _Cleopatra_ debacle got under way. I was in New York at the time. Frank and his henchmen took over and mashed Eddie’s performance. “This was a disgusting display of ego,” snorted Milton Berle, sitting in an audience that included comedians like Jerry Lewis, Danny Thomas, and Red Buttons, any one of whom, if he’d tried, could have joined in and made the Clan look silly. Elizabeth Taylor, on Eddie’s side that night, raged: “He may have to take it from them, but I don’t. One day they’ll have to answer to me for this.”

Steve McQueen was one young actor I managed to extricate from the Clan. I took him under my wing when he was driving racing cars around like an astronaut ready for orbit. “You could kill yourself when you were single, and it was only your concern. But you’ve got a family and responsibilities now. Think of them.” Between his wife and myself, we got him away from overpowered automobiles.

I took to Steve as soon as I saw him in “Wanted Dead or Alive.” I liked his arrogant walk, the don’t-give-a-damn air about him. So did Frank. When he sent Sammy Davis, Jr., into temporary exile for indiscreet talk to a newspaper about other Clansmen, Frank had Sammy’s part in _Never So Few_ rewritten for Steve. When Frank is in a movie, he becomes casting director, too.

He took Steve on a junket to New York when the picture ended, and Steve took along a big bundle of Mexican firecrackers, which he cherishes. He hadn’t previously been any kind of drinker, but in Frank’s crowd you drink. From the tenth floor of his hotel Steve had a ball tossing lighted firecrackers into Central Park. When the police ran him to earth, it took all of Frank’s influence to keep him out of jail.

As a peace offering, Steve had a live monkey delivered to my office in advance of his return. He wasted his time. I don’t like monkeys, so I gave it away and summoned Steve for some Dutch-aunt lecturing when he got back. “I know all about your trip. You were loud, boorish, and probably drunk. You have to make up your mind whether you’ll have a big career as Steve McQueen or be one of Frank Sinatra’s set. Think it over.”

Twenty-four hours later he gave me his answer. “I was out of line. I was flattered that Mr. Sinatra wanted me, but I’d rather stand on my own feet.”

* * * * *

I sometimes wonder about the Leader. His face lit up like a neon sign when he broke the news to me that he was going to marry Juliet Prowse, the South African dancer to whom he was engaged for an hour or so. “I haven’t seen that light in your eye for ten years,” I told him.

But I suspect the men around Frank went to work against Juliet. It’s easy enough to work the trick if you’re determined and unscrupulous. A word dropped into the conversation here and there will plant the doubts. “Do you think she really goes for you, Frank?” “She’ll probably figure on keeping her career.” “You should have met that family of hers--strictly nothing.” Frank was convinced eventually that Juliet wasn’t for him.

With all his talents and power, I sometimes wonder who’s the Leader and who’s being led.

_Four_

When Louella Parsons heard that I’d started work on this book, she telephoned to ask what its title was going to be. “Come, Louella,” I said, “you don’t expect me to reveal that to you, do you?”

“I hoped you would. And I hope you’ll be kind to me in your book because I was very nice to you in mine.”

“You certainly were--you got the facts about me so mixed up that I haven’t finished reading it.”

“Well, anyway, what are you going to write about?”

“I’m just going to tell the truth.”

“Oh, dear,” she wailed, “that’s what I was afraid of.”

* * * * *

In the days when I earned my living as a motion-picture actress, I was one of Louella’s regular news contacts. I had an insatiable curiosity about the town I’d known for years. I got around a lot, and lots of people talked to me. I salted down stories by the barrel load.

Louella would call up and say: “I understand you went to so-and-so’s party last night. Tell me something about it.” I was glad to oblige. Payment came in kind, not cash, when she inserted my name in her column, which helped a working actress.

She really was the First Lady of Hollywood then, for one good reason which nobody was allowed to forget. She was William Randolph Hearst’s movie columnist, and he was lavishing millions of dollars and acres of publicity space on his motion-picture properties, bent on making himself the greatest of all impresarios and Marion Davies the greatest star.

With the Hearst newspaper empire behind her, Louella could wield power like Catherine of Russia. Hollywood read every word she wrote as though it was a revelation from San Simeon, if not from Mount Sinai. Stars were terrified of her. If they crossed her, they were given the silent treatment: no mention of their names in her column.

When Hearst let himself be lured by Louis B. Mayer into putting his own production company, Cosmopolitan Pictures, under MGM’s wing, Louella’s power was apparently complete. She could get any story she wanted front-paged in the Los Angeles _Examiner_ and all other Hearst papers, none of them accustomed to making much distinction between real news and flagrant publicity.

At San Simeon, Hearst’s $40,000,000 Shangri-La in San Luis Obispo County, Louella mingled with the stream of visiting celebrities, stars, and producers that poured every weekend into the fabulous, twin-towered castle or the surrounding marble “bungalows” at the summons of W.R. or Marion. So did I. At the fifty-four-foot table in the Renaissance dining hall, you’d see Garbo, John Gilbert, Errol Flynn, Norma Shearer, Nick Schenck, Beatrice Lillie, Cissy Patterson, Frank Knox, Bernard Baruch. Name the biggest and they’d be there, including, on one occasion, Mr. and Mrs. Cal Coolidge and Bernard Shaw.

Nobody would deny that Louella has talent. She showed at her best with GBS, who was writing some articles for Hearst. All of us invited to San Simeon that weekend had been warned against asking Shaw for an interview. That didn’t stop Louella. He yielded to her persuasions only on condition that he have the right to approve every word of her article after he’d talked to her.

When she went back with the typescript he had her read it to him. After the first few words, he interrupted sharply: “But I didn’t say that.”

“Oh, Mr. Shaw,” she said, batting her big brown eyes, “I’m so nervous just being in your presence. What was it you said before?” He repeated the sentence, which she carefully inserted, and then read another line or two before the irate Irishman pulled her up short again.

This performance went on for some minutes longer before GBS took the manuscript from her hand. “Give it to me--I’ll write it myself,” he said firmly, proceeding to do just that. But Louella wasn’t through yet. When he handed back the completed article to her, she asked: “Oh, Mr. Shaw, won’t you please autograph it for me? It will be such a wonderful keepsake for my daughter, Harriet.”

He couldn’t refuse; he was writing for Hearst, too. So Miss Parsons scored in a triple-header. She collected the only interview Bernard Shaw gave in the United States. She subsequently sold the article to a Hearst magazine. And she has the autographed interview, which someday will sell for another tidy sum.

Some of us San Simeon regulars discovered that Louella isn’t slow to take credit. When W.R. and Marion went abroad on one of the many voyages they made together, we decided to throw a party for them on their return. We intended it as a gesture of thanks for all the parties of theirs that we’d enjoyed. We put on a terrific evening at the Ambassador Hotel, with its rooms crammed with flowers and cockatoos, and split the bill between us: $175 apiece. Louella was one of the party, and I’ll be damned if she didn’t write an article for a national magazine taking credit for it.

She owed a lot to Marion Davies. It was an article praising Marion in _When Knighthood Was in Flower_ that got Louella started with Hearst. It caught W.R.’s eye and prompted him to hire her away from her $110 a week as movie reporter on the New York _Telegraph_ into working for him at more than twice the salary. Over the years Marion shielded Louella from boss trouble more than once. After W.R. died in 1951, she was among those who didn’t exactly hurry to give Marion sympathy.

She did ring the doorbell, however, immediately after Marion had appeared on my television show. She arrived at her house bearing as a gift a photograph of herself in a heavy silver frame. She proceeded to place it in full view on a table in the front hall, taking star position ahead of an autographed portrait of General Douglas MacArthur.

Marion asked me to take a look when I arrived soon after Louella had left. I carried it back to the library, where Marion was sitting. “Do you want this?”

“No,” she said quizzically. I took the frame home to substitute a photograph of Marion standing beside me on the TV show, returning the old frame and new picture to her the following day.

* * * * *

Louella didn’t regard me as a serious rival when I got started as a columnist in 1938. Andy Harvey, in MGM’s publicity department, had recommended me to Howard Denby of the _Esquire_ syndicate: “When we want the low-down on our stars, we get it from Hedda Hopper.” I was signed by Mr. Denby and sold to thirteen papers straightaway, the first to buy being the Los Angeles _Times_.

The betting in town after column number one appeared was that I wouldn’t last a week. My mistake was being too kind to everybody. I didn’t tell the whole truth--only the good. I set out to write about my fellows in terms of sweetness and light, not reality. I began:

Just twenty-three years ago my son was born. Since then I’ve acted in Broadway plays. Sold Liberty Bonds in Grand Central Station. Knitted socks for soldiers--which they wore as sweaters. Made very bad speeches on the steps of the New York Library. Helped build a snowman on Forty-second Street ... when the streetcars were frozen solidly in their tracks. Earned money for one year as a prima donna in _The Quaker Girl_ with only two tones in my voice, high and low--very low. Played in _Virtuous Wives_, Louis B. Mayer’s first motion picture.

I’ve worked with practically every star in Hollywood. Sold real estate here--made it pay, too, but not lately. Was a contributor to one of the monthly magazines. Did special articles for the Washington _Herald_. With a friend, wrote a one-act play. Through pull had it produced at the Writers’ Club and was it panned! Ran for a political job here; thank goodness the citizens had a better idea! Coached Jan Kiepura in diction. Learned about the beauty business from Elizabeth Arden in her Fifth Avenue salon. Made three trips abroad, one to England on business. Put on fashion shows. Have a radio program.

And today I begin laboring in a new field and am hoping it will bring me as much happiness as that major event which took place twenty-three years ago. I can only write about the Hollywood I know. About my neighbors and fellow workers. Amazing stories have been written--many true. Hollywood is mad, gay, heartbreakingly silly, but you can’t satirize a satire. And that’s Hollywood....

I was green as grass, and the town jeered at me. Luckily, I had a good friend at my side. Wonderful Ida Koverman carried the title of executive assistant to Louis B. Mayer, but she was the real power behind his throne. To all intent and purpose, she ran MGM. Two months after my launching, when I was sinking slowly in an ocean of kind words for everybody, she gave a hen party for me. On the guest list were Norma Shearer, Jeanette MacDonald, singer Rosa Ponselle, Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford, Sophie Tucker, press people, public-relations people--every woman you could think of. There was only one holdout--Louella.

It was a night to remember. A forest fire was blazing in the hills, and the sky was lit with flame. I was burning, too. Ida had just set me straight about column writing. “They’ve laughed at you long enough. You’ve been too nice to people. Now start telling the truth.”

That was the best advice she ever gave me. It marked a turning point. My telephone started ringing like a fire alarm every day soon after.

“Hedda,” the callers would moan, “how can you print such things about me?”

“It’s true, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but you’re my friend. I didn’t think you’d tell.”

“I’m earning my living with my column. I’ve got to tell the truth. You didn’t call when I wrote sweet nothings about you, did you? If you can’t face facts, then I’m sorry.”

The column began to grow almost instantly, on the way up to its present readership of 35,000,000 people, which came about after I switched from _Esquire_ to the Des Moines _Register & Tribune_, then in 1942 to Chicago _Tribune_-New York _News_ syndication. (If I stop to think of that audience figure, I get so scared I can’t write a line until I’ve pushed the arithmetic out of my mind.)

Louella prepared for a fight. She had an intelligence service that included telegraph operators, telephone switchboard girls, beauty-parlor assistants, hotel bus boys, doctors’ and dentists’ receptionists. Her medical-intelligence chief was her husband, Dr. Harry Watson Martin. She called him Docky or Docky-Wocky. He was often known as Lolly’s Pop. His special field earlier had been venereal disease and urology, his hobby was show business, and he retired as head of the Twentieth Century-Fox medical department.

Docky had the friendship of everybody, along with a certain nonchalance. He once took a dive into the Bimini Bath pool when it lacked a single drop of water, broke his neck, and lived to marry Louella in 1929. He displayed a similar unconcern about water one morning when Louella, dressed up to go ashore for Mass, made her cautious way down the gangplank of a yacht in Catalina Harbor straight into the sea. Docky was waiting in the dinghy, engrossed in the Sunday papers. “Ready to go, dear?” he asked, not raising his head until her splashing drew him to her rescue.

Leaving a party, Docky once fell flat on the floor and lay there, comfortable enough. When a friend came forward to hoist him up, Louella put out a restraining hand. “Oh, don’t touch him, please. He has to operate at eight o’clock this morning.”

Through Docky’s good offices, Louella had a tie-in with testing laboratories, notably those making rabbit tests for pregnancy. This private line into the womb could give her news that a star was pregnant before the girl knew it herself.

But I had sleuths on my side, too. As an actress, I knew directors, producers, stars, and the men and women who worked on the other side of the cameras. One special ally was Mark Hellinger, a hard-boiled columnist for the New York _Daily News_ before he became a gentle, kind, and great producer for Warner Brothers and Universal.

He called me over to his house for an off-the-record conference and offered to help “because you’re going to need it.” He said: “I don’t somehow care for what Miss Parsons stands for. Whenever I hear a story at the studio, I’ll pass it on to you. I shan’t be able to call you through the switchboard, so I’ll give it to you from a private booth. There won’t be time for questions, but you’ll get the truth.”

The scoops I had on the affairs of Warner Brothers nearly drove Jack Warner out of his cotton-picking mind. He could never make out how it happened. When he reads this, he’ll know.

Louella watched her monopoly start to crack. If she was asked to a party, she’d want to know whether I was going to be invited. If I was, she’d demand that I be excluded “or else I certainly shan’t come.” Some timid hostesses fell for that. I laughed in their faces for their cowardice.

Anxious to break her hold, producers were steering my way more and more of the items that had previously been hers alone--the news of engagements, weddings, pregnancies, and divorces that made up a fat share of her daily diet. An engagement announced first to Louella had been good for six months of smiles for the happy couple. An exclusive on a pregnancy was even better--the mother-to-be could count on nine months’ favorable notice, which could be extended if she gave Lolly a beat on the birth announcement, too.

The competition she was getting didn’t make her any fonder of me. When Jean Parker was about to marry for the second time, she telephoned me: “I want you to have this exclusively.”

“No,” I warned her, “you must tell Louella.”

“But I don’t want her to have it.”

“You can’t afford to give it to me alone. Call her and tell her I have the news, too. For your career’s sake, you must.”

Ten minutes later she called back, weeping. “I did what you said and told her I’d given it to you. She said: ‘Get it back from her, or I won’t print it.’”

“Tell her she’s got it exclusively, if it means so much to her,” I said. “What’s one story among friends--and you’ll need friends.”

If a studio passed along a story to me that Louella thought she should have, she raised the roof, if necessary going over everybody involved to the studio head himself: “Hopper was given that. I should have had it. Don’t let it happen again.”

Even a producer as peppery as Darryl Zanuck had reservations about doing anything that might antagonize her. Zanuck, at that time Twentieth Century-Fox production chief, thought nothing of squaring off and mixing it in a fist fight with a director who argued with him. But when Bill Wellman, after three days of shooting on _Public Enemy_, urged that Eddie Wood, who was the star, should be replaced in that gangster epic by a newcomer who had the second lead, Jimmy Cagney, the fiery Zanuck flinched.

“My God, we can’t do it, Bill. Eddie’s engaged to Harriet Parsons, Louella’s daughter. Parsons will raise hell.”

“You son of a bitch,” answered Bill, who’s a flinty character. “You mean you’re going to let that decide it?”

“Damn it, no,” said Zanuck, put on his metal. “You go and put Cagney in.” And that’s how two men with guts turned an ex-chorus boy into a star.

Harriet married not Eddie Wood but King Kennedy. There were more stars in attendance than there are in the Milky Way when the two of them became man and wife at Marsden Farms in the San Fernando Valley in September 1939. Some of the guests were old-timers like Rudy Vallee, Billy Haines, Aileen Pringle, Frances Marion, and myself. The photographers ignored us completely, to the point where Billy got spitting mad.

He went up to Hymie Fink, who had been the town’s best still photographer since Valentino’s day. “We’ll each give you five bucks if you’ll take a picture of us,” Billy offered. But Hymie couldn’t do it. He had his orders, he said. After Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy were divorced in 1944, King came to work for me as leg man, covering the studios for a while, but I insisted that he get Louella’s consent before I hired him.

Not many men had the courage of Bill Wellman and Darryl Zanuck. I was in a roomful of faint hearts at a party the Gary Coopers gave when Gene Tierney made a beeline for me: “I’ve been trying to get you all afternoon to tell you I’m going to have another baby.”

That was wonderful news. Louella and I both knew that Gene’s first child, a beautiful little girl, had been born with a sleeping mind--it was one of the many blows that life dealt Gene, who finally cracked under the torment and needed psychiatric care. I hustled to the telephone, but it was tied up with a call to Henry Hathaway, who was a patient at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. By the time I got through to the _Times_ night desk, Gene was nowhere to be found to verify her news for the paper. But Louella had barged over to me and was hanging on like a limpet.

Next morning I heard what had happened. Gene’s studio had given the story of the forthcoming baby exclusively to Louella the previous afternoon. When she heard Gene had told me, she had flounced over to the poor girl and delivered a tongue lashing so violent that Gene had collapsed into tears. Gary Cooper had been in another room and didn’t hear it, but of the whole mob of Hollywood heroes who listened to Louella, not one lifted a voice or a finger to help Gene. Fear of their own precious skins kept them as dumb as mutes at a funeral.